Sonic Acts

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Underground Division: Helen Pritchard + Jara Rocha – Rock Damages

22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam The Netherlands

The *Underground Division* is an action-research collective of different people based in London, Brussels and Barcelona. They are interested in technologies around subsurface rendering – a trans*feminist undercurrent exists in all of their projects intelligently engaging with the environment. Their lecture at Sonic Acts on this intuitive and cutting-edge practice gives insight into their ROCK REPO project, which starts from the damage around rocks to reconsider their agency. The *Underground Division* – here represented by Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha – will perform a lecture based on their project ROCK REPO. It is a device built by a team of trans*feminist post-normal scientists for thinking with rock. It is an inquiry into what rock is, what it could be, and the ways in which rock is seen or considered as an entity separate from its environment. As not easily fixed entities, rocks provoke a reconsideration of categories: inert or not, discrete or not, timely or not. A set of ​‘queering damage’ operations will be activated to attend to certain harms of technosciences in relation to volumetrics, geocomputation and the praxis of feeling backwards.

The *Underground Division* is an action-research collective that investigates technologies of subsurface rendering and its imaginations/​fantasies/​promises. It is dug by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting with the help of many other others. As a follow-up on the collaborative research Possible Bodies looking into co-construction of so-called bodies and 3D paradigms, the-body-of-the-earth is now attended to as the framework for a study on similar sensibilities but different spacetimes. The *Underground Division* bugs contemporary regimes of volumetrics that are applied to extractivist, computationalist and geologic damages. Their research will eventually culminate in the Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, a hands-on situation for device making, tool problematising and ​‘holing in gauge’.

London-based artist and researcher Helen Pritchard​’s work brings together the fields of computational aesthetics, more-than-human geographies and queer trans*feminist technoscience. Her practice considers the impacts of computation/​computational art on the figuration of environments and environmental justice for the development of inventive methodologies that propose otherwises. She is co-editor of Data Browser 06: Executing Practices (2018) and a special issue of Science, Technology and Human Values on Sensors and Sensing Practices (2019). Pritchard is the Head of Digital Arts Computing and a Lecturer in Computational Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Together with Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha, she activates the creative research group the *Underground Division*.

Jara Rocha is a researcher based in Barcelona who works through the situated and complex forms of distribution of the technological with a trans*feminist sensibility. With a curious confidence in transtextual logistics and a clear tendency to profanate modes, she tends to be found in tasks of remediation, action-research and in(ter)dependent writing. Main areas of study have to do with the semiotic materialities of cultural urgencies. Together with Femke Snelting and Helen Pritchard, she is currently active in the *Underground Division*.

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SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Daniel Mann – Healing and Killing in the Underground

22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

London-based filmmaker and writer Daniel Mann explores how image production shapes perceptions of armed conflict, colonisation and climate emergency. His films have screened internationally, including Motza el hayam (Low Tide) (2017) which premiered at the Berlinale’s Forum, and Salarium which was presented at the Sonic Acts Academy in 2018. Daniel Mann’s talk, titled Healing and Killing in the Underground, features a screening of an episode from Eitan Efrat’s and Mann’s film The Magic Mountain (2020). Thinking the surface of the Earth against its volume is tracing the very limits of representation. Underneath the ground, human bodies become surfaces upon which the land leaves its mark, imprinted directly into the cells and tissue. While the landscapes outside are captured and mediated in the form of postcards, paintings, snapshots and films that appeal to the naked eye, a rare energy leaks through the crevices in the stone below, before it is inhaled into the lungs, absorbed and consumed through the skin. Underground the body is the postcard of the subsoil.

Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker and writer. Mann explores the role of image production and circulation in shaping collective perceptions of armed conflict, colonisation and climate emergency. His 2017 film Salarium, co-directed with Sasha Litvintseva, was presented at the Sonic Acts Academy in 2018. His writing has appeared in journals such as Media, Culture & Society and World Records and his films have screened internationally at festivals including Berlinale (Forum). Mann holds a PhD from Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Film Studies Department, King’s College London, he is developing a new project on the role of Middle Eastern desert environments in cinematic depictions of war, conflict and future annihilation.

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SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Marjolijn Dijkman + Toril Johannessen – On 'Reclaiming Vision'

22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Note: Marjolijn Dijkman joined Toril Johannessen for the Q&A that followed the lecture On 'Reclaiming Vision' Bacteria, algae and other microbes are essential for the very being of life on earth.

Marjolijn Dijkman and Toril Johannessen warn us that every second breath we take is produced by algae in the oceans. Those ideas are beautifully visualised in their film Reclaiming Vision, which is a topic of their lecture at the Academy conference. A starting point of this talk is a film that was captured through a microscope. Its diverse cast of microorganisms was sampled from the brackish waters of the inner Oslo Fjord, alongside algae, cultivated at the University of Oslo. Starting from the assertion that looking evolved from the sea – eyes, in fact, evolved from marine algae – Reclaiming Vision takes the viewer on a journey through various ways of looking at, relating to and influencing nature.

Toril Johannessen is an artist living in Tromsø in Norway. Perception and representation as historical and technological constructs are recurring themes in Johannessen’s artistic practice. Combining historical records with fiction and her own investigations, and with an attention to how science coexists with other systems of knowledge and belief, her works often have elements of storytelling in visual or written form. Most recent solo shows include Entrée and Trykkeriet, Bergen (2019); OSL Contemporary (2019), Munchmuseet on the Move, The Munch Museum, Oslo (2018) and Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen (2017).

Brussels-based artist Marjolijn Dijkman​’s practice addresses the human desire for knowledge, combining speculation with science in works that seem sci-fi in form. In reflecting on how institutionalised systems are relied on to assert the politics of assumed knowledge, her work proposes alternate knowledge systems. Her projects involve history museums, scientific enquiry and forms of collective imagination, manifesting in photographic archives and films, installations and sculpture. Futurology, museology, anthropology, cosmology and ecology are all areas the artist investigates. Dijkman has had solo shows most recently at NOME Gallery, Berlin, Munchmuseet, Oslo and fig‑2 at the ICA Studio. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as Contour Biennale 9, Mechelen, the 21st Biennale of Sydney and the 11th Shanghai Biennale.

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SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Anja Kanngieser – Listening to Ecocide

22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

For political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser, sound is the sense mechanism that drives their work – from a documentary interlacing stories on resisting deep sea mining in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu to an audio walk on rising sea levels. As an academic, their work creatively amplifies social justice claims around politics and climate change. Anja Kanngieser’s talk, aptly named Listening to Ecocide, addresses through sound the complexities faced by frontline Pacific communities. The Pacific Island of Nauru at the heart of the Pacific Ocean is the frontline of environmental crisis. Strip-mined by colonisers of its natural phosphate reserves, the backbone of industrial agriculture, the island nation has relied on Australia’s brutal offshore refugee incarceration régime for the last decade. With severe eco-systemic vulnerabilities – contaminated water, diminishing land, droughts and sea inundation – Nauru exemplifies the precarious position induced by extractive colonialism and racial capitalism. Bringing together site-specific audio recordings with Indigenous Nauruan voices campaigning for self-determination and self-representation, Kanngieser shows sound and listening as vital to understanding, and amplifying, the deep relations to land and sea that Nauruan’s hold and the complexities they face.

Anja Kanngieser is a political geographer and sound artist based in Wollongong, Australia, who creatively investigates space and politics. In their work Anja begins with the premise of sound as a constant, a phenomenon that is always present – whether heard, felt, or sensed by human or non-human species and technologies. Their most current projects use testimony, field recording and data sonification to document and amplify social justice responses to the effects of climate change in the Pacific. In their first book, Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds (2013), they open up communication between urban groups to find common sites for protest around precarious living and working conditions, migration and higher education. Research interests include labour practices in China, sound technologies for mapping movement and micro radio in Japanese urban politics. In their most recent project, Climates of Listening, community-oriented social justice responses to climate change in the Pacific are amplified. A Vice Chancellors Fellow at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research at the University of Wollongong, Australia, their writing is widely published and they are an editorial board member of journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

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SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Nabil Ahmed – Ecocide Forensics

22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

As founder of the project INTERPRT, artist, writer, researcher and musician Nabil Ahmed makes a clarion call for international criminal law to protect against ecological impunity. The environmental justice project that has worked with Princeton and renowned art institutions leans on spatial design to consider ecological visual culture, investigating at-risk regions like bio-diverse and conflict-ridden West Papua/​Indonesia, endowed with the planet’s largest reserve of copper and gold. International criminal justice offers considerably limited protection to the environment and to the livelihoods and dignity of peoples. In West Papua, where the Papuans are fighting the longest self-determination struggle in the Pacific, the Indonesian state and minerals, natural gas and palm oil corporations are getting away with ecocide and crimes against humanity. Yet today, civil society groups, NGOs and journalists have expanded access to geospatial information, audiovisual media and open-source data to expose state violence and corporate crimes. Forensic truths acquired by non-state actors are increasingly admitted in legal contexts and for advocacy purposes. This lecture explores how spatial analysis and environmental forensics are put to work by INTERPRT to not only document underreported environmental offenses and human rights violations, but also in an effort to recognise ecocide as an international crime. First invoked during the Vietnam War, ecocide has the potential to be an effective tool for climate frontline governments and civil society in the fight against ecological impunity at the international criminal court and beyond.

Nabil Ahmed holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is affiliated with Forensic Architecture. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Fine Art in the architecture and design faculty at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is also founder of INTERPRT, which investigates environmental crimes using spatial analysis and advocates for the criminalisation of ecocide under international law. The group collaborates with international lawyers, research centres and civil society such as Princeton Science & Global Security and Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, and has exhibited projects at venues including Biennale Warszawa/​Modern Art Museum in Warsaw and the Beirut Art Centre. INTERPRT is commissioned by TBA21 – Academy. Ahmed has written for Third Text, Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge and Architectural Review among others and is published in numerous books.

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SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Terike Haapoja – Vulnerability, Community, Animality – The Art of Being Here with Others

22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

New York-based artist Terike Haapoja represented Finland at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). Her projects and collaborations, including those in collaboration with Laura Gustafsson, challenge human-centric perspectives. Gustafsson&Haapoja enacted a trial in which eight-year prison sentences were given for killing wolves and opened a museum for cattle. In 2019, their 16-speaker sound installation of pigs awaiting slaughter brought the animal factory to Zone2Source in Amsterdam. Terike Haapoja’s lecture Vulnerability, Community, Animality – The Art of Being Here with Others, takes 2020 as a landscape of deepening polarisation in the political sphere as well as between people and Earth’s other inhabitants. At the core of these divides is a question of the ​‘we’ of political community, traditionally defined as ​‘we the people’. On one side of the void looms white nationalism, closing borders and rising fascism. On the other, rights of nature and decolonial demands to dismantle the state apparatus. This void hides legal divides between things and persons, and ontological divides between subjects and objects: gendered and racialised mechanisms of making killable and making sovereign. How these divides have been constructed and how we could rethink them is at the core of Haapoja’s interdisciplinary work. Starting from her collaborative art projects, Haapoja approaches questions of animalisation, law, interspecies communality, vulnerability and ethics in relationship to art and its role in political change.

Terike Haapoja is a visual artist based in New York. Haapoja’s large-scale installation work, publications, writings and political projects investigate the mechanics of othering with a specific focus on issues arising from the anthropocentric worldview of Eurocentric traditions. Haapoja represented Finland in the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) with a solo show in the Nordic pavilion, and her work has been awarded with several prizes, including ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (2016), Dukaatti prize (2008) and an Ars Fennica Prize nomination and for her work with writer Laura Gustafsson as Gustafsson&Haapoja. Haapoja is an adjunct professor at Parsons Fine Arts and New York University.

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SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

T. J. Demos – Beyond the End of the World

22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Celebrated writer T. J. Demos rarely leaves a seat empty at his talks on politics, ecology and art, often attending to decoloniality within nature. His most recent book addresses the occlusions embedded in the academic use of the term ​‘Anthropocene’ (human-caused planetary change) in shielding problems as opposed to opening inroads for change made accessible by artists. This presentation discusses the ongoing research and exhibition project, Beyond the End of the World, directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies at University of California, Santa Cruz (beyond​.ucsc​.edu). In the wake of the end of multiple worlds, we already live in a post-apocalyptic present following countless genocides and colonialisms. With reference to diverse traditions of the oppressed, this year-long research project addresses what lies beyond dystopian catastrophism, past and present end-of-world narratives, and how we can imagine and cultivate radical futures of social justice and ecological flourishing.

T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer and Professor of Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely about contemporary art, global politics and ecology and is the author, most recently, of Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017) and Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016). Demos co-curated Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in 2015 and organised Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting, at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2014. He is currently working on a Mellon-funded research, exhibition and book project dedicated to the questions: ​‘What comes after the end of the world?’ and ​‘How can we cultivate futures of social justice within capitalist ruins?’ #politicsandart #ecologyandart #anthropocene #future #experimental art

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@speakermusic speaks to @arifonline about the origins of techno, un/available historical nostalgia and a HECHA hat he is wearing that says: Make Techno Black Again.

This is the third episode of the Sonic Acts x Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee podcast series on the occasion of Sonic Acts Academy 2020, taking place in Amsterdam 21 - 23 February.

MUSIC

Speaker Music - with empathy

The Other People Place - Let Me Be Me

Speaker Music - without excess

Young Paint & Actress - Travel Paint

Zadie Smith on NPR

DJ Stingray - Cognitive Load Theory

Dopplereffekt - Technic 1200

Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - And the Flower have Time For Me

Speaker Music - Exercises in Black Quantum Drumming

Heatsick - Déviation

Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Her Eyelids Say

Fhloston Paradigm - ...all feat. Moor Mother

Ashtar Lavanda - Opulence

DeForrest Brown Jr. is a New York-based rhythmanalyst and media theorist. Brown’s praxis Speaker Music is inspired by Rhythmanalysis, a book of essays by urbanist philosopher Henri Lefebvre as well as considerations of momentum and the ‘chronopolitical’ from cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun. Mobilising free improvised electronic percussion and stereophonic audio recordings, Speaker Music yearns to caress, engineer and sculpt sentiment into a multi-textural rhythmic body, quivering the nexus event of the moment into a collapsed ‘nonpulsed time’ towards a shared sphere of intimacy.

Mix, Production: Arif

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Lukáš Likavčan and Leonardo Dellanoce speak about extinction, spectres and the game Death Stranding. They discuss how the future influences the present and how computer modelling fails to predict the Australian forest fires. This is the second episode of the Sonic Acts x Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee podcast series on the occasion of Sonic Acts Academy 2020, taking place in Amsterdam 21 - 23 February.

Read more at 2020.sonicacts.com

Theorist Lukáš Likavčan collaborates on art projects, including the simulation alt’ai, questioning machine protocols in communicating with environments. Exploring imaginations of Earth from the impersonal, totalising view to one in which humans are environmental accidents at home anywhere, he finds resonance in a line from Holly Herndon’s Extreme Love (2019): ‘We are completely outside ourselves, and the world is completely inside us.’ Concluding his PhD in environmental studies at Masaryk University, Brno, he now teaches at Center for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU in Prague and Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. Likavčan just released a book Introduction to Comparative Planetology (2019, Strelka Press) that presents an analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and the geopolitics of climate emergency.

Leonardo Dellanoce, invited by Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee to host this conversation, is an art historian who explores technological realities using art and design as navigational tools. Collaboration is at the core of his practice, as he works with artists, spatial designers and theorists on a variety of projects. Among others, he is co-leading the cross-disciplinary research project Vertical Atlas: a Techno-political Cartography, and co-curating Digital Earth, a 6 month research fellowship for artists and designers in Africa and Asia. Currently, he is also editor of Volume magazine where he initiated the long-term research project Trust in the Blockchain Society.

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Sadaf speaks to Ivan Cheng in this first episode of the Sonic Acts x Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee podcast series on the occasion of Sonic Acts Academy 2020, taking place in Amsterdam 21 - 23 February. Read more about both artists below.

2020.sonicacts.com

Sadaf H Nava (Sadaf) is an Iranian-born, New York City-based composer and visual artist whose multidisciplinary interventions include sound, film, painting, performance and text. Sadaf’s layered and cinematic visuals, sonics and confrontational performative tactics oscillate between opacity and narrative. Her work upends the inward-looking affect inherent to contemporary performance, subverting the languages of auto-fiction and the artist/ muse. These original compositions comprise intuitive and clashing material inspired by contemporary global archaeologies of sound, always flirting with noise.

Ivan Cheng, who is a regular on Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, also edited this episode. He focuses within his practice on misunderstanding, abrasion and desire in the act of reading, often gesturing towards systems of power and reproduction. He also works as a performer, clarinettist, curator and writer. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut), having previously studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Text-based performances have been presented in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Amsterdam, Vilnius, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Krakow, Lyon, Saint-Etienne, Bonn & Köln. He initiates project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Photo by John Spyrou

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